Like David Rowan from Wired UK, I was invited to spend an evening last week playing with XBOX Project Natal. I’m guessing most people know what this is but if you don’t, think of it as controller less gaming. That undersells it (a lot) so think of it as Minority Report for games. Actually that doesn’t really help so perhaps just check out the video.

David left the event pretty excited about the potential for Natal. I was excited but also wanted to ponder on what I had seen and experienced. It’s almost a week since I played it and I’ve been giving it some thought before I wrote this post.

We only got to play one game – Ricochet – where you throw back balls that come at you to a wall you’re trying to break down. It was frustrating to only have one game but in many ways that was the idea – to leave you thinking. Imagining. On that front the team succeeded. The game itself game was slightly unnerving to begin with as we’ve become so accustomed to using a controller in our hands (or hand with Wii) that you feel a bit self-conscious and unsure if it’s really going to react to your flailing as you’d like it to. The reality is it does, and before long I found myself leaping about so much that I literally smacked a fellow player as he stood observing. They may need to ship Natal with some “police line" – do not cross” tape or a set of traffic cones :) [update: a post today from Todd Bishop at Techflash gives some more details on the space you’ll want for Natal]

It was interesting to watch different ages play the game – though I guessed most folks at the event were in their 30’s, the younger seemed much less self-conscious about all that leaping and using every part of their body to whack the ball. Natal maps 48 points of your body which meant it could recognize and reward when you’d used your head to whack a ball versus your hand, knee or ankle. I tended to be more of a leg/knee person and frankly was pretty tired after a 3 round game. I’m not sure how much that says for the cardio taxing capability of Natal vs my own lack of fitness!

Playing only one game would have been more frustrating had it not been for Peter Molyneux of Lionhead and Fable fame. He was on hand to set some context for us that this was really just an early look at Natal and was designed to set our minds thinking about the art of the possible. He did a good job as the more I thought about it over the last week, the more I think I have seen the future of not only video games but also TV and perhaps even the web. XBOX 360 now includes movies, music, Twitter and Facebook and I could easily envisage the smoothness of using my hands to “swipe” at the screen and navigate all of this content. It also has voice recognition so perhaps (and I’m only guessing here, not predicting) I could write Tweets via XBOX and Natal with my voice. That’d challenge my verbosity to stick to 140 characters.

Getting back to the core gaming aspect of Natal though. To be honest, I was expecting to be impressed by it and I wasn’t disappointed. The reaction time was easily good enough for many types of games and I can imagine many Wii titles becoming truly fantastic on Natal due to the superior graphics and vastly more natural body recognition. That’s not a slight against Wii as it’s set the bar for user interaction and having spent Christmas playing snowboarding, ski-jumping and bowling with my nephew I was very impressed by it. Next Christmas I expect to wow him with all of those same sports but with much better graphics and more accuracy. Comparison’s to the Wii end there for me though as what will really blow people is the additional types of games and interaction we’ll likely see from Natal. One only has to think of Molyneux’s Milo demo in the E3 video (1.50s in) to see where things are going. Existing games like dancing and singing will get a jolt, new releases of games like golf and driving will get new features from Natal…in fact it could be a terrific golf simulator I expect….but the real magic is that totally new categories of games will be dreamt up on the back of Natal. Add in the 20m user social network that is XBOX Live and the potential is mind blowing.

If Natal launches with a strong game in each of those categories (Wii comparison, traditional game and Natal designed blockbuster) then I’m convinced it’ll be a smash hit. I have no idea what it’ll launch with but given XBOX’s history of solid launches I’ve no doubt they will deliver. If they do, it promises to be a very very green Christmas.

Check out Destination Imagination for more on Natal